Friday, June 15, 2007

Virtual spectators

As spectator sports go, video games are no match for the football terraces or the racing stands. But Microsoft hopes to change that by giving its video games a "dynamic spectator mode", in which the footage is streamed to a third party who becomes a virtual observer but takes no part in the action.

In this kind of stealth mode, the spectator can swoop through the landscape observing the play from any vantage point, stop and replay the action, as well as cheer (or boo) the participants by means of an instant messaging system.

This is so new! NOT! :)) LOL Microsoft! The Half-Life 1 series of multiplayer games, like Counter-Strike, Team Fortress Classic, Day Of Defeat or even Half Life itself, have had a similar application called "Half Life TV", or in short, HLTV. This was used to watch online games and it had all the facilities mentioned in the MS patent. You could also follow the action from the POV of every player, it had automatic instant replays of interesting moments and it could be customizable all the way to oblivion. And this is just the one I know exists.. there may be other broadcast spectating apps out there, for games I've never heard of. Yeah, this is such a novel idea, that it's only been implemented about 4 years ago.. at least.. :)) Hahaha! LOL! MS Strikes Again!!

This shows how little MS know about games. And how they are trying to capture basic ideas and own them. They they already have done with the operating system. PS. Don't work for MS - they work you way too hard. Ultimately it's not satisfying as you are working for a corporation that rips people off through attempting to gain monopoly control. And it's all hirearchical - your progress depends on how good a boss you have. You have been warned.

There IS a story here - that large software companies are abusing a patenting system which there is massive complaints against. Software patents are in a state of disrepair in most of the world. How about you do a piece on that, or at the very least notice the prior art. A bit of research would show you that this is covered with prior art, certainly since the mid-90's, in huge numbers of titles.

I cannot believe that the patent office would even consider such a huge breach of developers rights! Copyrighted software should be that. This reminds me of the time MSoft were trying to patent the double click!